


Slingshot

by sanidine



Series: Prompts & Kinkmeme Fills [11]
Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Animal Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-12-07 09:49:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11621073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanidine/pseuds/sanidine
Summary: Bo Dallas drove a Volvo station wagon, which Dean only remembered because he thought it was a pretty weird car for a teenager.But then again, Bo was just kind of a weird guy.





	Slingshot

**Author's Note:**

> For a prompt from SakuraHijiri, who said  
> "I still like the crack ship of Dean Ambrose/Bo Dallas" andIAnd for Bo I'd like his old cute, innocent gimmick, not the current one. And I'm not that interested in too much smut, but more in the why/background story of his relationship with Dean. And I'm absolutely okay with a dark AU."
> 
> I don't know how 'dark' this is necessarily, but there are vague allusions to some fairly shitty things. Mind the tags! I proooobably could have rated this T, but better to be safe.

Dean had been held back even after all the other students had been let out of detention so that the teacher on detention duty could tell him how concerned everyone was about his behavior. Dean had just stared off at the painted cinderblock walls. If he opened his mouth he would probably just end up getting in more trouble. That was the whole reason he was in detention in the first place - for telling the history teacher to go fuck himself when he had told Dean not to put his head down on the desk in class.

Another detention wasn't a big deal, just more of the same usual bullshit. Except by the time he got done being talked at and was let out, all the other delinquents had already peeled out and Dean didn't have anyone to catch a ride from. Dean’s first thought, standing on the steps with his breath forming ice clouds in front of him, was that it was too damn cold to walk home. But that was a dumbshit thing to think. It didn't matter how cold it was, because Dean was just going to have to walk home regardless.

The only cars left were in the teacher parking lot, except one vaguely familiar station wagon still idling in student parking, a big white plume of exhaust blooming up behind it in the frigid afternoon. The way the light was glancing off the windows meant that Dean couldn't see who was in there, but as he trudged across the icy asphalt he remembered -

Bo Dallas had been in detention, sitting in the front row, and Bo drove a Volvo station wagon. Dean only remembered that because he'd always thought was a pretty weird car for a teenager.

But then again, Bo was just kind of a weird guy.

Dean wasn't sure if Bo would give him a ride or not. They didn't really know each other. But Dean figured that the least he could do was ask - worst case scenario, Bo would say no and Dean would just be right back where he started.

The window rolled down slowly after Dean knocked on it, revealing Bo’s stringy hair and grinning face in gradual inches. Something about it seemed off and it took Dean a second to realize that it was because the window was on a hand crank instead of electric. Dean shoved his hands even further into his pockets, hunched his shoulders against the cold and waited. And waited.

Dean remembered all the weird rumors that he had heard about Bo’s family, but he could feel the heat radiating out of the car and decided he was willing to take the chance.

“Hello!” Bo said finally, once the glass was down far enough. “Can I help you?”

“Hey, uh. Can I get a ride. Please?” Dean asked, the word foreign on his tongue. “I don't live that far, and it's really cold out...” Dean exhaled, his breath clouding the air as if to illustrate his point.

“Of course!” Bo said, and if his face wouldn't have looked so earnest Dean would have been sure that Bo was fucking with him. “Don't want to get frostbite, I bet your parents would be really sad if your toes froze off.”

Dean didn't say anything as he slid into the warm interior of Bo’s Volvo. Bo was at least a year older than Dean, old enough to drive, but it was hard to remember that when Bo always seemed so optimistic and naive. It wasn't like the guy was an idiot - Bo was in all the Advanced Placement classes, which Dean definitely wasn't - but it seemed like no one in Bo’s  upbringing had ever bothered to teach him how to be normal.

“Buckle up!” Bo said, bright and cheerful in a way that made Dean blink and have to hold his tongue. The guy was doing him a favor, so Dean couldn't really complain even if he did grumble a little bit as he latched the belt.

“Happy now?”

“Always!"

Dean gave Bo the directions to his place, and as Bo was pulling out of the parking lot and onto the road Dean asked “So what’d you do?”

Bo’s brow furrowed as he flipped his turn signal on. “What did I do?”

“Yeah, you know. To get stuck in detention. I've never seen you there before.”

“Oh!” Bo stopped at a stop sign, flipped on his turn signal. “I got in trouble for bringing my slingshot to school.”

“Really?” Dean laughed “You got written up for a slingshot?”

Bo nodded, his face suddenly solemn. “It's a dangerous weapon.”

“Come on. It's not like you can hurt anything with a slingshot -”

“Oh, yes I can!” Bo smiled, glancing at Dean before he went back to focusing on the road. “I kill things with it all the time.”

Bo still had the heater cranked, but Dean felt himself go a little cold. The dirty snowbanks on the side of the road looked almost black in the fragile winter light. The inside of the Volvo was silent except for the road noise of tires on pavement for a long moment until Bo spoke up again.

“Well, I guess I don't kill things, because _things_ aren't alive to start with. That's why they're called things and not plants or animals!” Bo clarified, almost more to himself than to Dean. “So I guess what I should have said that I kill _rats_ all the time.”

“...with a _slingshot_?”

“Yep!” Bo said “It's in the glove compartment.”

Dean still didn't completely believe Bo, even as he reached out and popped open the glove box. When Dean imagined a slingshot he thought of, like, a rubber band wrapped around a forked twig. But what he took out of the glovebox was of an entirely different caliber.

The wooden frame of Bo’s slingshot had to be at least an inch thick, carved out of a single piece of wood with the swirling grain on the handle worn smooth and sleek. The sling itself was a soft piece of leather that was connected to the wood by a couple of pieces of elastic that looked almost as thick as the tubes that junkies tied off with. Dean hefted it in his hand. There was no way it was as deadly as the handguns that were sometimes left lying around on the counter at the apartment, but something about it still felt -

Dangerous. Loved.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Bo said, startling Dean out of his reverie. “If you want, you could come over some time and I could show you how to use it!”

The car slowed to a stop, and when Dean looked up he noticed that Bo had pulled up outside the apartment block where Dean was staying. There were a couple of guys that Dean recognized smoking on the sidewalk. Bo waved to them and Dean cringed internally.

“Uh, sure.” Dean shoved the slingshot back in the glovebox and grabbed his backpack out of the footwell. “Thanks for the ride.”

\----

Dean hadn't thought that Bo had actually been serious. But when Bo stopped him in the hall after lunch the next week, Dean still said yeah. Sure. It would be a good story, if nothing else. At least Dean would be able to figure out if some of the rumors about the guy’s weirdo family were true.

The sprawling junkyard where Bo lived was sandwiched in between a couple of shuttered factories, hemmed in only by a tall fence that was topped with razor wire and the frozen river beyond. Bo parked in front of a couple of low slung buildings, pale green paint etched with frost.

“Do you want something to eat?” Bo offered, as Dean stood up out of the station wagon “I have a box of Cosmic Brownies we can share.”

“Uh” Dean looked over towards the building that he figured was the house. It didn't look like anyone else was around “You got any beer?”

Bo’s face scrunched up in obvious distaste “My brother does.”

Dean didn't say anything else about it. He was curious to see if what people said about Bo was true, maybe, but he didn't really want to know the same for Bray.

Offers of food declined, Dean followed Bo out through the maze of dead vehicles, hands shoved down in his jacket pockets except for when he reached up to pull his hat down over his ears. It wasn’t as cold as it had been the week before but Dean still felt his nose going numb as he trudged along the well worn path in the snow. Bo set up a little range at the edge of the junkyard, away from the cars, just a line of old coffee cans on a snowbank. Dean blew hot air into his hands, looked back and forth across the graveyard of vehicles while he waited.

It was a quiet afternoon, except for a couple of dogs barking somewhere in the distance. Bo pressed a handful of rusty ball bearings into Dean’s palm and held out the slingshot and smiled and smiled. Bo kept smiling, and it didn't even turn mean when it became immediately apparent that Dean was a hopeless shot. Bo tried to help, stood behind Dean with their bodies lined up together, covering Dean’s hands with his own. Dean could feel Bo’s body heat radiating into him as Bo guided him through drawing the shot back, aiming and releasing. But once Bo had stepped away again, Dean went back to missing, hands shaking in the cold.

Once Dean had exhausted his ammo and shrugged off the offer of further lessons, Bo took the slingshot back and led Dean out into the junkyard again. It all looked the same to Dean but Bo seemed to know where he was going, leading the way confidently, the slingshot bobbing in the back pocket of his pants. They passed through the shadow of a partially crushed ambulance, then back out into the orange afternoon light.  Snow and chrome and glass everywhere, lots of shiny things for the sun to reflect off of, and Dean had to hold one hand up to his eyes to shield them.

They kept moving to keep warm as the afternoon wore on, wandering back and forth across the junkyard as the sun crept closer to the horizon. Dean had a cut on the inside of his mouth that he kept reopening with his tongue, bright iron that flooded his mouth as the cold nipped at his fingertips. He was just about to ask Bo what the fuck they were really doing when -

Bo froze in his tracks, cocked his head to the left. Dean couldn’t stop fast enough and almost bumped into Bo’s back, only caught himself at the last second when he dug the toes of his sneakers into the snow. Dean opened his mouth to ask what was wrong, but when he saw the way that Bo was grinning he shut it again.

When Dean turned to see what Bo was staring at he saw that there was a huge black rat sitting on the roof of a mostly snow covered Chevy Caprice. It was sitting up on it’s haunches, and Dean thought it looked almost curious with the way that it had it’s little front paws raised up in front of it, the way that it staring at them with it’s beady black eyes.

Then, the rat wasn’t looking at anything.

Bo had moved faster than Dean could register out of the corner of his eye, pulling the slingshot out of his back pocket and firing at the rat. Dean heard the snap of the elastic band, and the rat didn’t even have time to squeak before it was knocked backwards off the roof of the car and out of sight.

“Got it!” Bo sounded like a little kid who had gotten a prize out of a claw grabber machine.

“Damn.” Dean whistled, low. “That killed it?”

“Let’s go check!” Bo suggested, leading Dean around the Caprice. Sure enough the rat was laying there in the snow, a motionless black lump with it’s hairless tail curled to the side. Bo nudged it with the toe of his boot before he stuffed the slingshot back into his pocket, seemingly satisfied.

“Damn.” Dean said again, following a few steps behind. He felt sort of weird, in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on. “Never would have pegged you for a sharpshooter. One shot one kill.”

“Oh!” Bo stopped and turned to Dean and grinned again “That’s real nice of you. But they don’t always die right away. Sometimes they lay there and twitch, but the second shot always kills them!”

Bo sounded so happy, but Dean had opened the cut on the inside of his mouth again, tasted blood.

“Hey, uh.” Dean kicked the toe of his shoe into the hard snow, didn't look at Bo. “I'm getting kinda cold. Can we head back?”

“Sure!”

Bo talked during the entire walk back, going on about calculus (a class that Dean wasn't in) and Planet Earth (a TV show that Dean hadn't watched) and how cool it was to have someone to hang out with after school. There still wasn't anyone else around when they got back to where Bo had parked the Volvo, even though the sun was gone behind the horizon and the sky was a furious red.

Dean had one ball bearing that had gotten lost in the corner of his pockets, and he kept rolling it between his fingers. It was rough, pitted by corrosion, and Dean thought about asking Bo where the ball bearings had come from but instead he just kept his mouth shut until -. They were standing by the station wagon and Bo was leaning back against the door and saying something about playing video games and Dean stepped up into Bo’s space and kissed him.

Dean wasn't great at kissing. Too rough, too sloppy, but he just hoped that Bo wouldn't mind too much. Dean was better at doing the stuff that Bo probably really wanted, he just hadn't had as much practice with kissing. But Dean didn't like to actually ask for it, and kissing someone got the point across quickest.

“What are -” Bo started, pulling back a little.

But Dean cut him off, kissing him again. Bo bumped back against the side of the Volvo, breath huffing out of his chest and into Dean's mouth and Dean shivered and twisted closer. His hands went to the Bo’s waistband, fumbled with the belt buckle for a split second until Bo wrapped his own hands around Dean's, stilling them and pulling them away from his pants.

“What are you doing?” Bo asked.

Dean opened his mouth, faltered as he lost the words. He didn't know what to say. Dean had thought that was just what he was supposed to do when he kissed boys. But Bo seemed genuinely confused instead of angry or disgusted, which was just about the only thing that kept Dean from bolting.

That, and Bo was still holding his hands. It was the warmest that Dean's fingers had been all day. Bo waited patiently until Dean took a deep breath of the icy air and finally managed to say

“Isn’t that why you wanted to hang out?”

Bo just looked at him, face questioning. Dean sighed.

“Y’know. To do stuff.”

“Oh.” Bo shook his head for a second before he smiled again “I thought we had been doing stuff? We can go shoot more cans of you want!”


End file.
